Datacorp awarded SBIR grant

Providence, RI. – Datacorp president and chief executive officer Dr. P. Allison Minugh is pleased to announce that the Datacorp team has been awarded a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institute of Drug Abuse of the National Institute of Health.

The SBIR is a highly competitive grant program that encourages small businesses to develop specialized technologies for commercialization. The program is designed to stimulate high-tech innovation to help the United States meet its research and development needs.

Datacorp will use its SBIR funding to refine the D3: Data Documentation Database. The D3 is an automated, user-friendly software package for data documentation that solves a common threat to good research – inadequate data documentation.

“In our own data management experience, we have encountered this problem repeatedly,” Minugh said. “It is endemic in clinical trials, surveys, and secondary data gathered by state agencies. Poor documentation weakens the integrity of study data and leads to incorrect conclusions, poor recommendations and differential findings – even when researchers use the same data set.

“Despite its importance, few studies document accurately. Not only are current technologies for data documentation time consuming and cumbersome, data documentation is not typically a part of formal education and training. The D3 will solve this problem using a guided format that, when combined with other features, produces accurate and complete documentation even when users have no formal training in data documentation and data management.”

The D3 is specifically designed for research studies in the social sciences, epidemiological and behavioral health fields. It will benefit researchers, government officials, universities, research institutions and businesses that analyze and report their own data.